The Invention of Color, Pigments in Ancient Times

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1Philip Ball: The Invention of Colour

Philip Ball

The Invention of Colour

The 2011 Van Gogh exhibition at the Royal Academy in London was widely praised for

revising our view of the Dutch artist. Its central focus was a selection of Van Goghs correspondencewith his brother Theo, and these letters show that he did not work in a crazed frenzy, as the romantic

legend might have us believe, but was methodical and thoughtful about his technique. The letters,

which are of course long familiar to art historians, reveal a man passionate not so much about love and

death as about art, and in particular about its techniques and materials. One great source of inspiration

for Van Gogh was colours, especially the new colours that during his lifetime had only recently become

available to artists. He wrote to Theo that:

I have got new ideas and I have new means of expressing what I want, because better

brushes will help me, and I am crazy about those two colours, carmine and cobalt. Cobalt

is a divine colour, and there is nothing so beautiful for putting atmosphere around

things. Carmine is the red of wine, and it is warm and lively like wine. The same with

emerald-green. It is bad economy not to use these colours, the same with cadmium.1

This focus on materials is not unusual among artists. Van Goghs friend Paul Gauguin was

preoccupied on Tahiti not with metaphysical questions where we are from, where we are going nor

about his sexual relations with the local women, as again legend might encourage us to believe, but

about the very prosaic difficulty of getting the pigments he needed.

There is a metaphor here for the way we traditionally think about art. Art historians havetended to analyse paintings in intellectual terms: what is the artist trying to say? What feelings is he or

she attempting to convey? But painters themselves are more often concerned with the practical issues

of creating a painting: of putting colours on canvas. How and where can they get their paints? Are those

materials reliable? How much do they cost?

1 Mark Roskill (ed.), The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, p.252. New York, Simon & Schuster, 1997. p.252.


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2 Interfaces 33 (2012)

Over the course of the twentieth century we came to take the materials of art for granted.

One may find racks upon racks of bright paint tubes in any art shop today. A close inspection of the labels

reveals that many of the paints contain chemicals with complicated and daunting names: quinacridone,

phthalocyanine. These are products of the modern chemical age, and were not available to Rembrandt

many of them, indeed, not even to Monet. Every time new colourants were discovered or invented, the

possibilities for the artist expanded. But this was not an uncomplicated, linear process of accumulation.

It was affected by factors such as cost, geographical availability, reliability and colourfastness of the

material, and the degree of conservatism in the artists technique. In this contribution I look at this issue

of how art got its colours, and in particular I want to raise the question of how the invention of newcolour has affected the directions that art has taken.2

It might seem strange to study art by looking at its materials. But that would not have been

strange at all to painters of the Middle Ages or the Renaissance. They were deeply engaged with their

materials, and out of sheer necessity, because they made their own paints from the raw materials.

These painters knew that the quality of their art depended vitally on the quality of these materials.

Although that is still true today, few contemporary artists have a comparable relationship with the

physical characteristics of their medium. One suspects there is a perception almost of something vulgar

about such tangible aspects of art. This means not only that some artists have undertaken ill-informed

and disastrous experiments with paints, but also that art itself is in danger of losing touch with its roots

as a practical craft.

Colour in antiquity

The most ancient art we know of, such as that painted fifteen millennia ago in the caves of

Lascaux (Fig.1), used pigments dug straight from the earth: ground-up minerals such as red and yellow

ochre and chalk. These earth colours are generally quite dull. The ochres are iron-rich minerals,chemically similar to rust. For black, cave artists usually used charcoal. And so the most common

colours were those that nature offered most abundantly: black, white, red and yellow.

2 Philip Ball,Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour. London, Penguin, 2001.


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a

b

In 1969, anthropologists Brent Berlin and Paul Kay claimed that colour words appear in all

languages in the same sequence.3Some aboriginal languages distinguish only two colours: black and

white. Others have three: black, white and red. When a fourth term is added to the language, it is always

either yellow or green, followed by the other of these two. So the quartet of black, white, red and yellow

corresponds to a kind of universal four-colour scheme there are no languages with, say, terms for only

red, yellow, blue and orange, or just red and blue. It seems unlikely to be just coincidence that these four

basic colours are the ones that nature offers most readily.

3 Brent Berlin & Paul Kay,Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution. Berkeley, University of

California Press, 1969.

Fig.1 a, Cave art from Lascaux, France, painted c.15,000 BC. b, Red and yellow ochre.

These and all subsequent pigment images are kindly provided by L. Cornelissen & Son, London


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The Egyptians used these pigments too, but they had a broader palette. Egypt in the third

millennium BC had a surprisingly sophisticated chemical technology, because this was a product of

the crafts that were central both to everyday and to religious life. In Egypt the artists were priests, and

art was a devotional practice. Artworks were thought to acquire supernatural power through religious

ceremonies. So the production of pigments was a socially important task.

One of the most renowned pigments of the ancient world was Egyptian blue (Fig.2), which is

made by grinding up an artificial copper-containing compound: calcium copper silicate. This substance

is made by melting sand together with copper minerals and chalk. It was probably discovered as an

offshoot of the manufacture of blue-glazed stones called faience, which were first made in Mesopotamiaaround 4500 BC. Faience was used for decorative purposes, and stimulated experiments with materials

and kiln designs that probably also lead to the discovery of glass and of copper smelting the beginning

of the Bronze Age.

a b

Fig.2 a, Egyptian blue inHunting Birds in a Papyrus Thicket, a wall painting from the tomb of Nebamun, 8th Dynasty

(c.1567-1320 BC), Thebes. British Museum, London. b, Egyptian blue


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So this blue pigment probably arose by chance as a side-product from a technology developed

for making something else entirely. This is a common pattern for pigment discovery, which recurs

right through to the twentieth century. Without the social demand for substances such as glass, soap,

metals, dyes and plastics, it is unlikely that many of the technologies for pigment manufacture would

have evolved, or would have been economically viable. The artists palette is partly a by-product of

industrial technology.

The Egyptians also knew how to use simple chemistry to make artificial whites, yellows,

reds and greens, such as verdigris, made by letting vinegar fumes corrode copper. So their colour

scheme was rather rich. The Greeks knew of these pigments, but they did not necessarily use themall. Some of the most renowned painters of classical Greece in 600-400 BC, such as Apelles, the court

painter of Alexander the Great, chose deliberately to restrict their palettes to just four colours: the

universal black, white, red and yellow. Nearly all Greek painting has been lost now, but Figure 3

shows a Roman mosaic at Pompeii which reproduces an original Greek painting of Alexander, and it

gives an impression of the muted Greek palette.

Philip Ball: The Invention of Colour

Fig.3 The Alexander mosaic from the House of the Faun, Pompeii, a reproduction of a work

by the Greek painter Philoxenos from the 4th

century BC


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It is not clear why this four-colour scheme was adopted. One suggestion is that, as the Greeks

moved beyond the flat, two-dimensional pictograms of the Egyptians to depict three-dimensional

shading, they found it difficult to achieve a harmonious balance of tones with too many colours.

Whatever the case, the austere four-colour palette was eventually deemed the dignified and sober

choice for serious artists, a prejudice that persisted in Imperial Rome. Pliny in the first century AD

condemned artists who used so-called florid colours even the reds and yellows, he said, ought to be

earth colours rather than brighter pigments such as cinnabar which, ever since Alexanders conquests,

could be imported from the East. Pliny feared that the sensuousness of Oriental colours would corrupt

the supposed purity of artistic expression developed in classical Greece. But unfortunately for Pliny, public taste was more vulgar, delighting in bright colour. His

injunctions didnt stop craftsmen from using such colours for interior decorating, as we can see from

the richly coloured wall fragments and murals that survive at Pompeii (Fig.4). Unfortunately, the mural

techniques of the ancient world often fail to preserve the colours well. Exposed to sun and air, they

fade, discolour or flake off, leaving buildings and statues bare of their original colours and making the

classical world seem now like a much more drab, pale place than it really was.

Fig.4 Mural from the Villa of Mysteries, Pompeii, c.50 BC. Image Kari Bluff.


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Magic and materials in the Middle Ages

Chemical technology thrived in what we have in the past mislabelled the Dark Ages, especially

during the eighth and ninth centuries. These innovations happened not in the traumatized Christian

West, but in the Islamic Middle East, where Arabic scholars mixed Greek philosophy with the practical

skills that flourished in Alexandrian Egypt. They were blended in the art of alchemy.4

Even today alchemy is still widely misunderstood, being considered either as a misguided

or fraudulent quest to make gold or as a metaphor for spiritual transformation. Some alchemy was

certainly done by tricksters or deluded gold-makers, but it is now generally regarded by historiansas having broader objectives. It is more aptly seen as pre-scientific chemical technology.5The Italian

craftsman Cennino Cennini wrote a craftsmans manual describing the many pigments then available

and how they might be obtained, made and used.6He mentions alchemy frequently, but it is clear

that for him this is not an esoteric or mystical art but simply a convenient manufacturing method for

his colours.

It is no coincidence that alchemists were making colours for artists, because colour is central

to alchemy. To make the Philosophers Stone the substance that could allegedly transform base metals

to gold one had to conduct chemical reactions that would take the raw materials through a specifiedsequence of colour changes. So it is not surprising that the alchemists tended to focus their attention on

the substances that offered a wide range of different colours. These turned out to be many of the same

materials that artists were using as pigments.

Take lead, for instance. It was known since ancient times that exposing it to the fumes of

vinegar and animal dung turned it white, owing to the formation of lead carbonate. This was known as

white lead, and was the painters finest white pigment until the nineteenth century.

But roasting white lead carefully in air will convert it to lead tetroxide, which is red. This

pigment, called red lead, was used in the classical world at least since the second century AD. 7

4 Eric John Holmyard, Alchemy. Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1957.

5 Lawrence M. Principe, The Secrets of Alchemy. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2012.

6 Cennino Cennini (1370-1440),Il Libro dell Arte(1437), translated by D. V. Thompson as The Craftsmans

Handbook, New York, Dover, 1960.

7 Elizabeth West Fitzhugh, in Robert L. Feller (ed.),Artists Pigments: A Handbook of Their History and

Characteristics, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1986, Vol. 1, p. 109-139.


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Cennino Cennini says it is manufactured by alchemy. In medieval Latin it was called minium, and

its extensive use in medieval illuminated manuscripts gives us the word miniature, although it is

purely coincidental that these works were small they simply had to fit on the page. Indian and Persian

miniatures of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, which also feature red lead abundantly, are often

finely detailed but not necessarily small.

Further roasting of red lead creates a yellow material: lead monoxide, or litharge. This was

used in the Middle Ages as a pigment known as massicot. There now seems nothing extraordinary

about these reactions of lead with various gases. But to the alchemists, they would have been seen as

evidence of some fundamental change that was purifying the lead, bringing it closer to the colour ofgold (Fig.5).

a b c

Yet the finest red pigment of the Middle Ages was, to the alchemists, perhaps the most

fascinating substance of all. The Islamic alchemists instigated the notion that all metals are composed

of two basic substances or principles: sulphur and mercury.8Alchemical or so-called philosophical

sulphur and mercury were abstract substances, not to be directly equated with the sulphur and mercury

one could extract from the earth. But nevertheless, if these two raw elements are mixed together and

heated, something miraculous happens. The dirty yellow sulphur and the silvery mercury combine

to form a hard, blackish red material: mercury sulphide, which turns bright red when finely ground.

Painters knew it as vermilion.9

8 Robert P. Multhauf, The Origins of Chemistry. London, Oldbourne Book Co., 1966.

9 Rutherford J. Gettens, Robert L. Feller & W. T. Chase, in Ashok Roy (ed.),Artists Pigments: A Handbook of

Their History and Characteristics, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993, Vol. 2, p.159-182.

Fig.5 Lead white (a), red lead (b) and litharge (c)


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The eleventh-century Benedictine monk Theophilus describes the synthesis of vermilion in

his own craftsmans manual.10He says:

take sulphur, break it up on a dry stone, and add to it two equal parts of mercury,

weighed out on the scales. When you have mixed them carefully, put them into a glass jar.

Cover it all over with clay, block up the mouth so that no fumes can escape, and put it near

the fire to dry. Then bury it in blazing coals and as soon as it begins to get hot, you will

hear a crashing inside, as the mercury unites with the blazing sulphur. When the noise

stops, immediately remove the jar, open it, and take out the pigment.

This is surely as detailed as any later description of a standard laboratory synthesis, althoughit bears tell-tale signs of its alchemical origins in the (chemically incorrect) ratios specified for the

two elements. Cennino, meanwhile, advises the painter to get vermilion ready-made from the

alchemists but not ready-ground, because some of them had a tendency to adulterate it with brick

dust, to make it go further.

The art historian Daniel Thompson has claimed that the invention of vermilion was the central

innovation of medieval art11:

No other scientific invention has had so great and lasting an effect upon painting practice as

the invention of this colour Given abundant vermilion, the standard of intensity in thepainters palette automatically rises. Equally brilliant blues and greens and yellows were

required to go with it If the Middle Ages had not had this brilliant red, they could hardly

have developed the standards of colouring which they upheld; and there would have been

less use for the inventions of the other brilliant colours which came on the scene in and after

the twelfth century.

We can see how much medieval artists loved vermilion by the way they would apply it in flat

swathes, for everyone to marvel at (Fig.6).

10 Theophilus (c. 1122),De diversis artibus. Translated by J. G. Hawthorne & C. S. Smith as On Divers Arts, New

York, Dover, 1979.

11 Daniel V. Thompson, The Materials and Techniques of Medieval Painting. New York, Dover, 1956, p.106-7.



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a b

The aim of the medieval artist was not to paint realistically. The subjects are almost always

religious, and the artists themselves were often monks, or at least were hired by monasteries. They

believed, as did the Egyptians, that paintings had a symbolic religious power, which was enhanced if

one used the finest materials and displayed them unmixed. So medieval works are rich in vermilion and

gold leaf and, in the later Middle Ages, in a still more wondrous pigment: ultramarine (Fig.7).

Fig.6 a, Altarpiece attributed to Masaccio and Masolino (c.1423-8). St Jeromes

drapery is rendered in vermilion. National Gallery, London. b, Vermilion


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Cennino says of this colour: Ultramarine blue is a colour illustrious, beautiful, and most

perfect, beyond all other colours; one could not say anything about it, or do anything with it, that its

quality would not still surpass.

As its name implied, it came from over the seas, because the mineral from which it is made

was not known in the West. Ultramarine is prepared from lapis lazuli, a blue stone found in Afghanistan.

For centuries, all of Europe depended on the Afghan mines for their most precious pigment, which cost

more than its weight in gold.

Ultramarine was precious not just because it was a rare import, but because it was extremely

laborious to make. Most mineral pigments were made simply by grinding them up. But grinding

raw lapis lazuli produces a disappointingly grey powder, because of the impurities that the mineral

contains. These impurities have to be separated, which is done by kneading the powdered mineral with

wax and washing the wax in water the blue pigment flushes out into the water. This procedure must

be repeated many times to fully purify the pigment.

In most of the altarpieces of the Middle Ages, the Virgin Mary is shown in blue robes (Fig.8).

Many art theorists have attempted to explain the symbolic significance of the blue: that it conveyshumility, virtue and so forth. But the main reason for this choice of colour is that the artist would

naturally have lavished the most precious pigment on the most holy aspect of the painting.


Fig.7 Ultramarine made from lapis lazuli


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A new perspective

Ultramarine, vermilion and gold leaf might be considered the primary blue, red and yellow of

the Middle Ages, the most precious colours a painter could acquire, and some altarpieces seem to use

little else. But by the time of the High Renaissance, things were different. TitiansBacchus and Ariadne

(1523) (Fig.9) is one of the most radiant images in Western art, and shows why Titian is considered to

be one of the finest colourists of all time.

Fig.8 Duccio, The Virgin and Child with Saints Dominic and Aurea(c.1315).

The Virgins robes are painted in ultramarine. National Gallery, London


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This is a completely different type of painting from those of the Middle Ages. We are now

seeing people and places depicted realistically, which is to say, in an attempt to replicate how they

would appear to a real observer of the scene. Light and shade, perspective, proportion and anatomy are

all accurately observed. This is the key feature of the Renaissance humanism: actual human experience

became the central concern of artists and writers, so that it was no longer sufficient to produce stylized,

iconic works of art that paid only lip service to the shapes and forms of the world we live in. Renaissance

artists put the viewer right in the picture.

This change meant that the materials of the painter no longer had the symbolic values of the

Middle Ages. Ultramarine was now prized simply because it was a beautiful and pleasing colour and

because it showed off the wealth of the painters patron and not because its expense makes it a suitable


Fig.9 Titian,Bacchus and Ariadne(1523). National Gallery, London


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devotional offering to God. Gold leaf gradually disappears from use during the fifteenth century, sinceits costliness counted for nothing if it did not produce a realistic effect. Painters preferred to mimic gold

using yellow, white and brown pigments.

And Titians paints are totally different to those of medieval artists. Pigments have to be mixed

with a fluid binding medium to make a paint. In the Middle Ages egg yolk was generally used as

the binder for painting on wood. But Titian and his contemporaries mixed their colours with oils. Oil

painting was perfected in Northern Europe in the early fifteenth century by the Flemish artist Jan van

Eyck, and was gradually adopted by the Italians from around 1460. In the so-called egg tempera method

the paints dry almost instantly, whereas oils are much slower to dry. This meant that colours could beblended and mixed, permitting the soft shadows and subtle shading that we see in Renaissance art.

The use of oils also compelled some changes in pigment use, because some colours look

different when bound in oil from when bound in water or egg yolk. In particular, both ultramarine and

vermilion are more transparent and less brilliant in oil. This forced painters to adulterate ultramarine

by mixing it with a little lead white to keep it strong and opaque, which helped to erode its mystique.

As a result, artists began to feel more free to use a whole range of lighter blues in their works. The art

historian Paul Hills says that Blue by the fifteenth century was moving away from its association with

starry night, the vault of the heavens, to the changeful sky of day.12

This was a change in colour useinstigated by the physics and chemistry of the artists materials.

But there were other reasons why Titian and his contemporaries had a wider range of colours

available than most medieval artists. Titian lived and worked in Venice, which along with Florence

was the artistic capital of Renaissance Italy. Venice was a major port where many of the rare spices,

foods, textiles and pigments from the East first arrived. So the Venetian artists had first pick of

the best colours, and they made abundant use of materials that came from the Arabic nations.

This made Venetian art extremely colourful. In Florence, on the other hand, where Leonardo da Vinci

and Michelangelo worked, there was greater emphasis on line on drawing skills than on colour.The art world of the Renaissance initiated a long-lasting debate on the relative merits of colour and line

in art, which resolved itself around the seventeenth century in favour of skill at drawing as the artists

most important attribute, with colour being merely a secondary consideration. This cast a shadow over

the use of colour in art until the nineteenth century.

12 Paul Hills, Venetian Colour: Marble, Mosaic, Painting and Glass, 1250-1550, New Haven, Yale University

Press, 1999, p.136.


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But during the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries Venetian art was full of bright colour. InBacchus and AriadneTitian uses just about every one of the pigments then available, and in doing so

he provides us with a map of the state of sixteenth-century chemistry.

The brilliant blue sky is ultramarine, as is Ariadnes robe. But the sea, which has a greenish

tint, is painted in azurite, a blue copper mineral known since ancient times (Fig.10). This is a cheaper

pigment, although the best grades were still quite expensive. There were azurite deposits in several

places in Europe, including France, Hungary, Germany and Spain. Imported ultramarine rarely made it

all the way to Northern Europe, at least at an affordable price, and so most of the blues in the works of

German and Dutch artists in the Renaissance are azurite.

There is vermilion here too, in Ariadnes scarf, but also another kind of red pigment: red

lake. This is made from red dyes, which are organic materials. Some red dyes were extracted from

plants, such as brazil wood and madder root (Fig.10).13Others came from animals: cochineal was

made in the sixteenth century from ground-up dried beetles, and lacor lacca, from which lake gets its

name, was a resin secreted by certain tree-dwelling insects from Asia and the Middle East. These dyes

were converted to lake pigments by dissolving the colouring agents in water and fixing them onto the

surface of fine particles of a white powder. This procedure was known in the Middle Ages, but was not

perfected until the Renaissance. Red lakes are darker and richer than vermilion; a common red lakeknown as kermes supplies the root of the word crimson. Lakes are translucent when used in oils, and

Renaissance painters often used them as translucent glazes to give rich flesh tones or to make purples

by red glazing over blue.

Renaissance yellows were typically compounds of lead, tin and antimony, which the

Egyptians had known how to make. But inBacchus and Ariadnethere is also a brighter, richer golden

yellow called orpiment (Fig.10), which is arsenic sulphide: the name means pigment of gold.14

It can be found naturally in mineral form, but a better-quality pigment could be had by making

orpiment synthetically. Its manufacture was surely an alchemical discovery, as Cennino hints. It ishighly poisonous, and some painters avoided it for this reason. Cennino warned painters to Beware of

soiling your mouth with it, lest you suffer personal injury. In view of this and its high cost, orpiment

is quite rare in Renaissance art, particularly in Northern Europe. One Northern painter who did make

13 Helmut Schweppe & John Winter, in Elizabeth West Fitzhugh (ed.),Artists Pigments: A Handbook of Their

History and Characteristics. Oxford, Oxford UniversityPress, 1977, Vol. 3, p. 109-155; Helmut Schweppe &

Heinz Roosen-Runge (1986), in R. L. Feller (ed.),Artists Pigments, Vol. 1, p. 255-283.

14 Elizabeth West Fitzhugh,Artists Pigments, Vol. 3, p. 47-80.



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use of it is Lucas Cranach, who had better access to it than most others because he also ran a pharmacy,and was therefore knowledgeable in the materials and methods of alchemy.

Also in this picture is the only pure orange pigment known until the nineteenth century

painters otherwise had to make orange by mixing red and yellow. The orange in the robes of Titians

cymbal-player is realgar, which is a different form of arsenic sulphide (Fig.10). It also occurs naturally,

and was imported to Europe through Venice from Romania and the East. Because it was so poisonous

and expensive, it is rather rare in Western art.

a b c d

The fall and rise of colour

Colour use during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries became subdued relative to the

exuberance of the Renaissance. Rubens often painted as brightly as Titian, but we remember this

period mostly for the more subdued palettes of Rembrandt, van Dyck and Poussin. There was not

much innovation in pigment manufacture during this time, and it is interesting that several of the new

pigments that did appear were in the autumnal colours typical of Rembrandt.15The prevailing attitude

of the connoisseurs by the early nineteenth century was summed up by Sir George Beaumont, an artistand a patron of John Constable, who said that A good picture, like a good fiddle, should be brown. 16

Constable was apparently eager to please his patron (Fig.11). If pictures were not brown

enough already, Victorian conservators often made them so with a coat of muddy varnish. In Constables

15 R. D. Harley,Artists Pigments c.1600-1836, 2nd Edn., London, Butterworths, 1982.

16 Richard Redgrave & Samuel Redgrave,A Century of Painters of the English School, London, Smith, Elder &

Co.,1866, Vol.1, p. 11.

Fig.10 Titians pigments included azurite (a), red lake (b here madder), orpiment (c) and realgar (d)


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defence, he is said to have protested by taking a violin and placing it on grass to show how different thetwo colours were. But nevertheless he observed the convention that expected artists to tone down their

colours. The fact that he was actually considered an innovator with an unusually bright palette tells us

how truly murky colour had become by the early nineteenth century.


Fig.11 John Constable, The Cornfield(1826). National Gallery, London.


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Let us have a look at these autumnal colours. Baroque painters who liked their works darkand golden could use Cassel earth, a peaty substance with a warm brown colour that Van Dyck liked so

much that it later became known as Vandyke brown (Fig.12). Some unfortunately turned to bitumen,

an oily, organic brown pigment that never dried and ended up ruining several nineteenth-century

paintings, such as Gericaults Raft of the Medusa. Indian yellow was a mysterious, odd-smelling

substance (Fig.12) imported from India by the Dutch and used by Rembrandt, which in the nineteenth

century was found to be made from the urine of cows fed exclusively on mangos. 17

a b

But in the late eighteenth century, a new rainbow began to spread across the artists palette.

This was the golden age of chemistry, when many new elements were being discovered and the

French chemist Antoine Lavoisier was starting to make sense of chemical transformations throughhis discovery of the element oxygen. That discovery is contentious; some claim that the first person to

identify oxygen was the Swedish apothecary Carl Wilhelm Scheele, one of the greatest experimental

chemists of his time. Scheele also isolated hydrogen, barium and chlorine, which was soon used by the

dyeing industry as a bleach. And in 1775 Scheele discovered a green substance while experimenting

on arsenic compounds. This was copper arsenite, which soon became used as a green pigment called

Scheeles green.18It was brighter than any of the earlier pure green pigments until then, many painters

had made greens instead by mixing blue and yellow.

Scheeles green was eclipsed by the discovery in 1814 of a new, more attractive arsenic-based

pigment, which became known in England as emerald green or Paris green (Fig.13). Both of these

arsenic greens were potentially poisonous: if exposed to dampness, they could be decomposed by

moulds to give off a toxic gas. Because they were quite cheap to manufacture, emerald green and

Scheeles green were used not only as artists paints but as household paints and on patterned wallpaper.

It has been claimed that this made damp rooms hazardous, and in the 1860s there were fears in

England that young children were being killed by the deadly fumes being released from their

17 Norbert S. Baer, A. Joel, Robert L. Feller & N. Indictor, in R. L. Feller (ed.),Artists Pigments, Vol. 1, p. 1-36.

18 Inge Fiedler & Michael Bayard, in E. West Fitzhugh (ed.),Artists Pigments,Vol. 3, p. 219-272.

Fig.12 Baroque colours: Cassel earth/Vandyke brown (a) and Indian yellow (b)


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bedroom walls. Whether arsenic greens were quite as dangerous as has been claimed is, however, stilla contentious issue.19

Perhaps the most important innovations in artists colours in the nineteenth century stemmedfrom the discovery in the late eighteenth century of a bright red mineral from Siberia, called crocoite or

Siberian red lead (Fig.14a). In the early nineteenth century the French chemist Nicolas Louis Vauquelin

investigated crocoite and discovered that it contained a new metallic element whose compounds were

brightly coloured. For this reason he proposed the name chrome, from the Greek word for colour.

The element is now known as chromium.

b

c

a

d

19 W. R. Cullen & R. Bentley (2005).J. Environ. Monit. 7: 11-15.


Fig.13 Paris green

Fig.14 a, Crocoite (natural lead chromate). National Museum of Natural History,

Smithsonian Institution, Washington.

b, Chrome yellow. c, Chrome orange. d, Viridian


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Crocoite is a mineral form of lead chromate. When Vauquelin made this compound synthetically, hefound it had a bright yellow colour (Fig.14b). This became used as a pigment called chrome yellow 20

not just for artists paints but also for commercial ones. It was widely used to paint coaches, for

example, anticipating its use on the yellow taxi cabs of New York.

Vauquelin found he could also make a different form of lead chromate that was orange the

first pure orange pigment since poisonous realgar (Fig.14c). And chromium oxide was a green colour.

With a little water incorporated into the crystals, this provided the rich green pigment called viridian in

England (Fig.14d).

The bright chromium colours were augmented by several others in the early nineteenth

century. In 1817 the German chemist Friedrich Stromeyer discovered a new element called cadmium,

a by-product of zinc smelting. He found that this metal could be combined with sulphur to make

bright yellow and orange pigments called cadmium yellow and cadmium orange (Fig.15). 21 In the

early twentieth century a deep red version became available, and grew rather popular; Matisse was

particularly fond of it.

a b c

In the late eighteenth century the French government considered pigment manufacture so

commercially important that it appointed leading chemists to devise new ones. The government asked

Louis-Jacques Thnard to look for a synthetic substitute for expensive ultramarine. In 1802, Thnard

found a way to make a rich blue colour from cobalt, which became known as cobalt blue (Fig.16).

Cobalt offered several other colours too: in the 1850s a cobalt-based yellow pigment called aureolin

became available in France, soon followed by a purple pigment called cobalt violet, the first ever pure

purple pigment. A sky blue pigment called cerulean blue (Fig.16), made from cobalt stannate, was a

favourite of some of the post-Impressionists.

20 Hermann Khn & Mary Curran Lead, in R. L. Feller (ed.),Artists Pigments, Vol. 1, p. 187-217.

21 Inge Fiedler & Michael Bayard, in R. L. Feller (ed.),Artists Pigments, Vol. 1, p. 65-101.

Fig.15 The cadmium colours: yellow (a), orange (b) and red (c)


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a b

What painters really wanted for a blue, however, was a cheaper form of ultramarine itself.In 1824 the French Society for Encouragement of National Industry offered a prize for the first practical

synthesis of ultramarine. It is a complicated compound to make the blue colour comes not, as in most

pigments, from the presence of a particular metal in the crystals, but from the presence of sulphur.

In 1828, a Frenchman named Jean Baptiste Guimet claimed the prize, which is why synthetic ultramarine

was subsequently widely known as French ultramarine.22

So pigment manufacture was no longer a cottage industry performed by apothecaries, but a

major industrial enterprise. Factories were set up in the nineteenth century to make and grind pigments.

Some sold them in pure form to the artists suppliers, who would then mix up paints for their customersfrom pigment and oil. But some pigment manufacturers, such as Reeves and Winsor & Newton in

England, provided ready-made oil paints which, from the 1840s, were sold in collapsible tin tubes. 23

These developments meant that painters became ever less familiar with what it was they

were buying, and had no way of assessing the quality of this profusion of new paints. And so a new

breed of professional began to appear: the colourman, who knew the skills of the painter but also

possessed some chemical knowledge that allowed him to test the materials that he supplied to artists.

In England, the foremost colourman of the nineteenth century was George Field, who supplied paints

to J. M. W. Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites.24We can readily see the difference these colours made

if we compare John Millaiss Ophelia (Fig.17) to Constables landscapes less than 20 years earlier

(Fig.9). Notice in particular how vibrant the greens have become too vibrant, in fact, for some tastes,

as evidenced by Ford Madox Browns comment that Millais was using greens unripe enough to cause

22 Joan R. Mertens (2004),Ambix 51, 219-244.

23 David Bomford, Jo Kirby, John Leighton & Ashok. Roy,Art in the Making: Impressionism. London, National

Gallery Publications, 1990.

24 John Gage, George Field and His Circle. Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, 1989.

Fig.16 Cobalt blue (a) and cerulean blue (b)


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indigestion.25These painters relied on Fields advice on the reliability of the new materials whether,for example, they would rapidly fade or discolour on the canvas. It was because of Fields assistance that

Turner was able to acquire the new colours almost as soon as they were invented, and he was amongst

the first painters in England to use cobalt blue, emerald green, viridian, chrome yellow and others.26

A willingness to embrace these new materials is part of the reason why Turner brought a blaze

of Venetian brightness to the dour early nineteenth-century palette. His Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus(1829) (Fig.18) was considered shocking by many contemporary critics: one of them called it a

specimen of colouring run mad positive vermilion positive indigo; and all the most glaring tints

of green, yellow and purple.27 Joris-Karl Huysmans, a prominent art critic at that time, was more

perceptive, comparing Turner to a Rembrandt born in India.28

25 Elizabeth Prettejohn, The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites, London, Tate Publishing, 2000, p.148.

26 In John Gage, Colour in Turner: Poetry and Truth, New York, Praeger,, 1969, p.123.

27 Ibid.

28 In John Gage, Colour and Meaning: Art, Science, and Symbolism, London, Thames & Hudson, 1999, p.162.

Fig.17 John Everett Millais, Ophelia(1852). Tate Gallery, London


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Turners use of colour influenced the Parisian Impressionists such as Monet, who came to

London to see his work. The Impressionists made equally avid use of the new colours. The shock of

seeing their work was not just that of seeing a new style of painting, without the clear edges and smooth

finish favoured by the French Academy of Fine Arts, but also of encountering colours never before

seen on canvas. In RenoirsBoating on the Seine(Fig.19), there are just seven pigments apart from the

traditional lead white, and all but the reds are modern synthetic colours: cobalt blue, viridian, chromeyellow, lemon yellow (strontium chromate) and chrome orange (basic lead chromate). They are

applied almost unmixed, and the impact of the new pure orange is very apparent in the boats outline

placed against the cobalt blue river. This is Impressionism straight from the tube.

Fig.18 J. M. W. Turner, Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus(1829). National Gallery, London


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The Impressionist style shaped the early work of many of the most important painters of the modern

age. Paul Czanne began as an Impressionist, and Vincent van Goghs work was transformed when he

came to Paris and saw these paintings. They gave him the inspiration to use bold, unmixed new colours

with glaring brilliance (Fig. 20). With the harsh dissonances in this work, called The Night Caf, Van

Gogh said that I have tried to show that the caf is a place where one can ruin ones self, go mad, orcommit a crime.29

29 Quoted in John Rewald, Post-Impressionism: From Van Gogh to Gauguin, New York, Museum of Modern Art,

1978, p. 210.

Fig.19 Pierre-Auguste Renoir,Boating on the Seine(1879-80). National Gallery, London


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Henri Matisse was an Impressionist early in his career, but he later used the new pigments

to yet more stunning effect as the figurehead of the movement known as the Fauves (wild beasts),

reflecting their uninhibited use of bright colour (Fig.21). Fauvism made colour a central constructive

component of modern art. Kandinsky initially painted in the Fauve style, and later attempted toidentify a universal emotional language of colour. None of this would have been possible without the

development of the vibrant new pigments in the nineteenth century.

Fig.20 Vincent van Gogh, The Night Caf(1888). Yale University Art Museum


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Living and dyeing

This explosion of colour was not confined to fine art. As chemistry blossomed, it brought colour

into the world at large, particularly when chemists discovered in the mid nineteenth century howto make new dyes from the aromatic hydrocarbons found in coal tar, the black residue from gas-

lamp burning.30These new dyes engendered fashions in dress that would strike us as garish today.

Women took to the streets in voluminous dresses and gowns of purple, magenta and other rich colours.

The 1850s were dubbed the Purple Decade, an epithet reflected inApril Loveby the Pre-Raphaelite

Arthur Hughes (Fig.22).

30 See Anthony S. Travis, The Rainbow Makers. Cranbury, NJ, Associated University Presses, 1993.

Fig.21 Henri Matisse,Le Bonheur de Vivre (1905-1906). Succession H. Matisse /DACS 2012.

Image 2012 The Barnes Foundation.


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This picture was painted in 1856, and it was in that year that the first coal-tar dye was synthesizedby William Perkin, who was just eighteen years old at the time and studying at the Royal College of

Chemistry under the German chemist August Wilhelm Hofmann. He discovered the coal-tar dye that

became known as mauve while trying to make the anti-malarial drug quinine at Hofmanns instruction,

and he immediately quit his studies and set up in business with his father and brother at a factory in

Harrow.31The gamble paid off, and half a century later Perkin was a rather shy and reluctant celebrity,

regarded as one of the greatest organic chemists of the age (Fig.23).

31 See Simon Garfield,Mauve. London, Faber & Faber, 2001.

Fig.22 Arthur Hughes, April Love (1856).

Tate Gallery, London.


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Perkin initially tried selling the dye under the name Tyrian purple, harking back to thelegendary purple dye of Imperial Rome, extracted from Mediterranean shellfish. But there was now

more to be gained by association with Parisian haute couture than with Classical antiquity, and the

word mauve comes from the French for mallow.

The rise of coal-tar dyes was accompanied by the chemical synthesis of the colouring

agents in common natural dyes. In 1868 chemists made alizarin, the molecule that gives madder

red its colour; and in 1877 indigo was

synthesized. This led to the collapse

of dye-growing industries in Europeand in the British colonies in India.

But it also spawned the entire modern

chemicals industry. The commercial

call for dyes was immense, and dye

manufacturers thrived. Towards the

end of the century they began to

diversify into new areas, particularly

pharmaceuticals. In 1909 Paul Ehrlich

discovered the first synthetic drug Salvarsan, a cure for syphilis while

using synthetic dyes to stain cells.

Most of the major European chemicals

companies Hoescht, BASF, Agfa,

Bayer, Ciba-Geigy began their

lives as dye manufacturers (Fig.24).

One might reasonably say that not

only did chemistry give us colour,

but the quest for colour gave us

modern chemistry.

Fig.23 Portrait of William Henry Perkin

by Arthur Stockdale. National Portrait

Gallery, London.


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Twentieth-century blues

The pigments of modern times encode their own stories about how art evolved in the

twentieth-century. One might think of the Day-Glo colours of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, or

the impact of new synthetic paint media like acrylics and alkyds on the colour choices of the Abstract

Expressionists and their successors.32In the 1950s American artists such as Frank Stella began to use

household paints made with these new resins, and so their palettes lay at the mercy of the commercialpaint companies. But I shall conclude with a single modern parable about chemistry and colour in art:

the story of the worlds most beautiful blue.

Yves Klein was never an artist in the league of Turner, Rembrandt or Titian, but he is

remembered for one thing: International Klein Blue, which he used for a series of monochrome

paintings in the 1950s (Fig.25).

32 Jo Crook & Tom Learner, The Impact of Modern Paints. London, Tate Gallery Publishing, 2000.

Fig.24 A selection of early dye samples from the German company Farbenfabriken Bayer & Co., Elberfeld.Courtesy of Bayer corporate History & Archives, Leverkusen.


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This colour simply cannot be done justice in any reproduction one must see it at first hand

to appreciate how lustrous it is. Klein believed that colour alone was sufficient to say all he wanted tosay, without the distraction of line and form. In 1954 he said,

I believe that in future, people will start painting pictures in one single colour, and

nothing else but colour.33

And that is just what he did.

Kleins blue is in fact none other than ultramarine the synthetic version of ultramarine

devised in the nineteenth century. But ultramarine never looked like this before at least, not on

33 Hannah Weitemeier, Klein, Cologne, Taschen, 2001, p. 9.

Fig.25 Yves Klein,IKB 82(1959). Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Gift,

Andrew Powie Fuller and Geraldine Spreckels Fuller Collection 2000.27.


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31

the canvas. Klein realized that pigments always tend to look richer and more gorgeous as a drypowder than when mixed with a binder, and he wanted to find a way to capture this appearance

in a paint. In 1955 he found his answer: a new synthetic fixative resin made by the Rhone-Poulenc

chemicals company, which could be thinned to act as a binder without impairing the chromatic

strength of the pigment.

This gave the paint surface a

matt, velvety texture. Klein

collaborated with a Parisian

chemical manufacturer and

retailer of artists materialsnamed Edouard Adam to

develop a recipe for binding

ultramarine in the resin

mixed with other organic

chemicals.34To protect this

mixture from misuse that

would compromise the purity

of his idea, he patented it

in 1960.

34 Nicolas Charlet,

Yves Klein. Paris, Vilo

International, 2000.


Fig.26 New directions in colour:

a, David Batchelor, Brick Lane

Remix (2003), Courtesy of David

Batchelor; b, Anish Kapoor,As if to

Celebrate, I Discovered a Mountain

Blooming with Red Flowers (1981),

Tate Gallery/DACS.

a

b


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The significance of this episode in art history is to show not only that some artistswere still depending on chemical assistance in the modern era, but also that the intimate

relationship of painters to their materials has not been entirely severed. Today painting is an

unfashionable art. Young artists want to work in sculpture, installation and video. While this does

lead to some interesting new directions for colour for example, employing coloured light,

or raw pigments (Fig.26), or rainbow-like refraction as in Andy GoldsworthysRainbow Splash(1981)

it is hard to imagine that paint has nothing more to say about it.

There are still painters who care deeply about colour and paint, but they are few, and rarely

young one might think of Bridget Riley, David Hockney, Howard Hodgkin. In an age when paintershave more choice of materials than ever before, this might seem strange. But perhaps in a way that

surplus of choice might contain the very problem: artists have lost confidence in paint because they

no longer feel they understand it. How different this is from the spirit apparent in an account by the

photographer Brassai of a conversation with Picasso:

Then the man in the blue suit reaches into his pocket and takes out a large sheet of paper,

which he carefully unfolds and hands to me. It is covered with Picassos handwriting -

less spasmodic, more studied than usual. At first sight, it resembles a poem. Twenty or so

verses are assembled in a column, surrounded by broad white margins. Each verse is

prolonged with a dash, occasionally a very long one. But it is not a poem; it is Picassos

most recent order for colours...

For once, all the anonymous heroes of Picassos palette trooped forth from the shadows, with

Permanent White at their head. Each had distinguished himself in some great battle - the blue period, the

rose period, cubism, Guernica... Each could say: I too, I was there... And Picasso, reviewing his old

comrades-in-arms, gives to each of them a sweep of his pen, a long dash that seems a fraternal salute:

Welcome Persian red! Welcome emerald green! Cerulean blue, ivory black, cobalt violet, clear and deep,

welcome! Welcome!35

35 Quoted in Picasso and Company, transl. F. Price, New York, Doubleday, p.87.

Documents

The Invention of Color, Pigments in Ancient Times